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O'Reilly Network: OS X Brings Unix Stability to the Mac

"...when you migrated from Mac OS 7.1 to Mac OS 8.5 and then to
Mac OS 9, there were no significant differences among the
revisions. The user interface looked and felt the same. Sure, new
advances came along, such as a Java runtime environment and better
disk utilities, but there were no milestone improvements to speak
of. The migration from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X, however, will change
all of that. OS X will be a major and long-overdue stepping-stone
in Macintosh operating system architecture."

"Apple has made it perfectly clear that they are moving away
from their classic Apple window architecture. The Apple menu bar
has been replaced with application-specific menu bars. These
pull-down menus give the environment more of a Motif or X-window
feel, but with an Apple designer flair. The appearance of the
new operating system definitely has Apple's graphic-designer market
in mind. Icons are now 32-bit color and use alpha channels to allow
for transparency. Window-specific dialog boxes are now sheets that
appear from the title bar of the application window."

"With a FreeBSD architecture native to Mac OS X, it's likely
that the tables will turn in these 3D computation benchmarks, as
well as with other tasks. Just imagine the new hot software you can
write for OS X. But what's even more mind-boggling is that an
operating system developed back in 1976 (Unix) is probably what's
going to restore the reign of Apple Computer. Had Apple started
with Unix when it shipped the original Macs, it's possible the
software icon, Microsoft, may have never become a household
name."